3 minute read
Redington
NICK SAMUELS
HEAD OF MANAGER RESEARCH, REDINGTON
Instead of looking to race onwards like other funds in the sector, we’re simply looking to find the best ideas in 2022. We have a 25-person manager research team, which is large by industry standards. We’ve really invested in our research to make us stand out and we try to hire people from within the industry.
We look for practitioner experience so that the person can bring their industry knowledge while learning about how to conduct manager research. So, when they’re talking to a fund manager, they speak and understand their language, as well as the markets themselves, and they understand where fund managers might be looking to pull the wool over your eyes. We employ people who used to be high-yield fund traders, rates traders, and previous chartered surveyors.
In 2021, we saw private equity perform incredibly well, and clients like it; it’s often as simple as that. We saw a high interest in private credit specifically, which we expect to continue and grow. It’s a big theme across our pension fund clients’ portfolios, since this part of our client base isn’t necessarily interested in private equity as most schemes have an end point. A private equity investment is something that our clients have previously had, but they’re not looking to make any new investments in the near future. However, private debt is different because the cashflow is ideal for a pension scheme. Within this, we’ve witnessed increasing interest in opportunistic strategies within our client base. We’re continuing to research broader private market strategies as well, since we have different sub-aspects of the client base, including endowments and wealth management. Here we expect impact private equity to be of interest, in particular.
This past year, we’ve done a lot of work on impact strategies to invest in more sustainable solutions. We focused on renewable infrastructure, private equity and private debt impact. We’re also working on natural capital and developing that too.
We assess every manager on how well they integrate ESG into their investment process. We’ve worked on this for a few years, and we’ve also been thinking about getting all portfolios aligned to net zero. In April 2021, we made a commitment to align all of our client advice to net zero, and to take our own business to net zero too.
In 2022, we’re looking to work with the asset management community to encourage them to align their portfolios to net zero. We’re trying to impress upon them that all funds should align to net zero, so our advice is not to launch a brand-new net zero version of your existing fund, given all funds will have to get to net zero. We’re asking them to get ahead of that if they’re going to continue running our client assets. What that means to us is putting in a constructive plan. Are you going to bring about a 50 per cent carbon reduction by 2030 – if so, how are you going to do this and how are you going to engage with your underlying portfolio companies? The conversation is live and is part of a bigger industry trend.
We think allocations to Chinese equities are very sensible; it’s very underrepresented in broad market indices and there’s a strong topdown story behind allocating to it, as well as a strong bottom-up alpha story. But, quite rightly, clients have expressed their concerns from an ESG point of view. There have been a number of regulation issues, and a lot of negative press. You rarely make money from investing in things which are comfortable, but we’ve definitely noticed a push-back from clients on these investments in the past year which indicates a reluctance for these types of investments in 2022.
